As is well known, insects have been damaging or destroying food and other articles, such as grain, fruit and wood dwellings or other property for centuries. Such insects are often invisible, being contained by the articles being destroyed, or hiding in cracks and crevices. Detecting the presence of the insects can sometimes be challenging, and is a necessary first step before application some means of control and/or elimination.
Bed bugs are an example of pests that can be difficult to detect. Adult bed bugs may be only about 6 millimeters long and 5-6 millimeters wide. They cannot fly, but they can move fairly quickly. When disturbed or when not actively hunting for their food source, namely the blood of animals and human beings, they actively seek shelter in dark cracks and crevices. Since they spend most of their time sheltering rather than feeding, they can be very difficult to detect simply by visual examination.
Bed bug populations have resurged in recent years, particularly throughout parts of North America, Europe, and Australia. The increase of international travel in recent decades has contributed to this resurgence. There are many aspects of bed bugs that make it difficult to eradicate them once they have established a presence in a location. They are most commonly found in rooms where people sleep, and they generally hide near the bed or other furniture used for sleeping. Their flattened bodies allow them to conceal themselves in cracks and crevices around the room and within furniture.
Favoured hiding sites include the bed frame, mattress, and box spring, as well as in baseboards and behind picture frames. Clutter around the room offers additional sites for these bugs to hide and increases the difficulty in eliminating them once they have become established. Thus there is a need for efficient and early detection, so that trapping and monitoring tools can be deployed.
Hotels are some of the most likely places for the presence of bed bugs, due to the transient hotel guests, and coming and going of their suitcases and possessions. It is extremely important for anyone with a bed bug problem, but for hotels in particular, to be able to detect the presence of bed bugs, and preferably to trap them as well, before the problem spreads from room to room.
In the hotel environment especially, but also in homes and other locations, it is also extremely important to avoid the stigma of a bed bug infestation, or even the stigma of the possibility of an infestation. It is therefore desirable to have a bed bug trap which serves another function in parallel, i.e. with no outward indication that it is in fact a bed bug trap.
Since hotel rooms and many household rooms often make use of power bars, the invention recognizes that it would be particularly advantageous to combine the function of a power bar with the function of a bed bug trap. A visitor to the room would perceive just the power bar, without realizing that it is also a bed bug trap.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,316,578 (Faham et al.) discloses a bed bug trap which plugs directly into an electrical outlet, and includes an adhesive surface to capture bed bugs, as well as a heating element to generate warmth to attract the bed bugs. However, its configuration is otherwise quite different from that of the present invention, and it lacks some of the features and flexibility of the present invention, including that it can only be positioned at an electrical outlet.